One hot growth area for thermoplastics in the next few years will be long fiber thermoplastics (LFT) as a metal replacement. They feature continuous fiber filaments running the full length of a plastic pellet, boosting strength, stiffness, and impact resistance over a wide temperature range. Pellet lengths can typically be specified in a 6 to 12 mm range while the fiber length in short fiber pellets is typically less than 1 mm.
One of the major suppliers is specialty compounder RTP Co. of Winona, MN, which uses a pultrusion process to manufacture LFT. In pultrusion, continuous fiber rovings are pulled through a polymer melt in a specialized die. The resulting composite strands are cooled and chopped into pellets. Loading levels are typically in the range of 40 to 50 percent. Glass fiber is the most popular reinforcement for cost reasons, but other materials provide different properties. Aramid fiber is used for wear requirements, while stainless steel fiber provides electrostatic dissipation (ESD) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding properties. Carbon fiber provides additional benefits in flexural modulus while also providing ESD properties, according to RTP, which has an excellent FAQ on LFT.
Among recent news, Celanese Corp. announced the acquisition of the long-fiber reinforced thermoplastics business of FACT GmbH (Future Advanced Composites Technology) of Kaiserslautern, Germany, a business unit of The Ravago Group.
At last June’s National Plastics Exposition in Chicago, several LFT technocgies were on display. PolyOne Corp. launched the OnForce LFT compounds, which are optimized for surface finish, stiffness, and toughness. SABIC Innovative Plastics (LNP) showed its StaMax long-glass PP compounds for automotive applications. Several other companies also supply LFT, which is expected to grow at the rate of more than 20 per cent a year when economic conditions improve. The dominant matrix resins are polypropylene and nylon, although others are also widely used.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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